Chapter 667, Death of Tiekai

"You have to be careful, he's very strange."

During the battle, Salilius gave a kind reminder.

But Martins actually felt it.

And he thought it was normal.

Humphrey Paul must be the first one to be infected among the Ironclad Space Marines, and he was probably the "darling" of the "Queen of Insects" and had undergone a deeper insect transformation. The difference between this Ironclad Chapter Leader and humans is even greater than that of ordinary Space Marines.

On this basis, the original vital points may no longer be vital points; his body can make many inhuman movements...

Maybe it's all normal.

It is precisely based on these foundations that Humphrey Paul can show such a strong fighting power that he can compete with Salilius-normally speaking, the "living" Humphrey Paul may be an outstanding leader, and may indeed be the most powerful warrior in the Ironclad, but his strength, in the scope of the entire universe, is definitely not as good as Salilius.

In theory, he should be stabbed to death by the Holy Lance after persisting for twenty or thirty rounds.

But it was meaningless to say anything. After Martins joined the battle, no matter how exaggerated the insect transformation of Humphrey Paul was, he could not fight against two top fighters at the same time.

Especially with the "Nirvana Guard" brought by Martins, dozens of people directly separated the battlefield and prevented other iron armored warriors from supporting Paul.

In the end, when Humphrey Paul was dealing with the phase sword, Salilius pierced his body with a spear and nailed him to the ground. Seeing that his body was still squirming and trying to break free, he pressed on him directly and pressed him to the ground with the holy shield.

Martins also took this opportunity to be quick and cut off his head with the phase sword.

Seeing that Humphrey Paul's body was still squirming, he went up a few more swords and completely dismembered his body.

Now, even if Humphrey Paul, who had been transformed by insects, could continue to fight without a head, it was useless.

Salilius picked up Humphrey Paul's head with a spear and loudly proclaimed their victory.

The enemy leader who had set off a shocking rebellion, involved four cosmic domains, mobilized countless manpower and material resources for a war, and even caused a greater disaster, was finally beheaded. His head still has weight, worthy of being picked up by Salilius with a holy spear, as a trophy to boast of victory.

And it is also practical: to show all the enemies around that your leader is dead!

Of course, this move will be much more effective when facing enemies such as green-skinned orcs and chaos traitors. Even if it is a chaos traitor, the elimination of a traitor leader will have a great morale shake on the remaining people, not to mention the green-skinned orcs, they may be directly defeated.

However, the symbolic meaning of "raising the head of the enemy leader" is meaningless to the infected or the swarm; but the elimination of the leader is of great significance.

Even greater than the green skin.

For the greenskins, when the boss dies, some of them will panic, lose morale, and feel that they are weak and can no longer win. This loss of faith is catastrophic for the orcs who believe that "whatever you think will come true", not to mention that after the death of the highest leader, the second-level and even more second-level ambitious people will rise up to compete for the position of the highest leader and start fighting each other and fighting internally.

This is already a very terrifying thing, especially when such incidents occur during the war.

However, compared with the Zerg, the impact of the death of a leader of the orcs may even be considered small.

The death of the leader of the orcs is just a great loss of morale, internal strife, panic... But for the Zerg, losing the leader is equivalent to losing the ability to think.

The thinking of the Zerg and the infected depends on the superior unit. They may have the "intelligence" to handle current affairs on their own, but there is no such thing as subjective initiative. This means that for the Zerg and the infected individuals, they roughly know "how to do it", but they don't know "what to do", let alone "why to do it".

The most direct manifestation of this is that after they have completed the current command but have not received further instructions from the upper level, they will become truly primitive beasts and stay where they are. They will indeed be attacked when approaching this time, but that is just the instinctive action of beasts.

But at this stage, who would be stupid enough to use human lives to fight in the face? Tens of kilometers away, with a huge cannon, just bombard them one by one and that's it - anyway, they don't know how to run or hide.

For the infected and the Zerg, if only some squad leaders and middle and low-level officers in the human army died, it would be fine. After all, the command rules of the Zerg can be covered downward. At most, the high-level node units or other node units of the same level can take over the individuals under the dead node units.

Unless they act independently.

Then there is really no way.

The Zerg must send new node creatures to connect to those out-of-control subordinate units and re-control them before they can resume command.

Some scholars in the Empire who specialize in studying the Void Zerg even believe that the structure of the Zerg is just such a divergent network.

The scholars boldly hypothesize that the Zerg has a "Void Will" which is the source of everything.

From this point, it radiates to each hive will subject, forming a cluster that scholars call "tentacles". The hive will is authorized to countless queens, forming one hive fleet after another, which is regarded as part of the tentacles. The queen provides the gene factors, hatches the swarm army including biological ships and advanced node creatures, and authorizes units such as "generals" and "overlords". These units, as commanders, are authorized to the intermediate hive tyrants, and then there are layers of authorization...

In this way, a network is formed.

But knocking down any node means that all units below the node are "disconnected from the network".

This principle is actually the same regardless of the size of the swarm and the infected. This is why killing some low- and medium-level node creatures has almost no effect on large-scale battlefields. After they die, there are still a large number of node creatures of the same level on the field who can take over their authority, and even their original superiors can directly govern the lower-level units. The extra "computing power" cost has almost no effect.

However, if the node creature with the highest authority dies on a large battlefield, it will be the end of the world.

Under him, all the high-level node creatures have lost their brains; if these high-level node creatures lose their brains, the intermediate node creatures will also lose their brains... The entire Zerg or Infected army will produce a chain reaction like a domino, and the final result is that the entire Zerg army will stagnate.

The death of Humphrey Paul brought a similar effect.

Can a "node creature" of the same level take over his authority?

No.

Can a higher-level node creature take over his command?

No.

Of course, there are higher-level node creatures, such as the Queen of the Zerg. However, the distance between him and the Queen of the Zerg is too far. The Queen of the Zerg cannot take over his command of an entire army across a distance of one or two star fields, and cannot even temporarily replace a high-level node creature to give authorization.

Unless it can send a high-level node creature, obtain authorization, come to the west side of the White Curtain Star Region, and then authorize a top-level node unit to reconnect the node units one by one.

But that is impossible, and humans will not give her this opportunity.

The death of Humphrey Paul triggered a chain reaction in the entire Iron Armor Army.

In front of Salilius and Martins, the Iron Armor Warriors who were just fighting desperately with their own Space Marines became wooden and mechanical. They will still perform combat actions according to instinct, but they are much more rigid than at the beginning. They will only attack the enemy in front of them and will not care about the situation a little further away.

Even the basic battle is like this, not to mention the execution of any exquisite tactical coordination.

The same is true for the Titans and Knights on the Iron Armor side.

Martins and Salilius immediately ordered the troops to break out and leave the battle.

The execution of the order was quite smooth.

After the troops left, the long-range firepower arrived.

This group of enemies was bombed stupidly.

Even, simply bombing like this is not fast enough.

After careful calculation, the masters of the Mechanicus accompanying the army determined several explosion points. The troops retreated, and the land-based version of the "Dongfeng Fen" missile was launched, and exploded accurately at the calculated explosion point.

At this time, it is not appropriate to calculate issues such as exposure, cover, and fortifications. They can't hide, and that Dongfeng Fen will sweep across an area equivalent to an ordinary city. It is not a problem. Hundreds of thousands of enemies will be eliminated by this missile.

It can be said that the moment Humphrey Paul was killed by Salisius and Martins, the battle of Wanzhou Star was a victory.

Of course, the overall victory does not mean the end of the war. After all, there are countless enemies on Wanzhou Star that need to be eliminated, and it is impossible to use the "Dongfeng Fen" missile to bomb the land inch by inch. That would be too expensive, and the ground troops still have to deal with it.

The general process is that the ground personnel are divided into teams and search in all directions. If they encounter enemies in small numbers, the sharpshooters in the team will use ultra-long-range sniper rifles to clear them one by one. If they encounter strong individuals, they will use anti-armor heavy firepower to shoot them down remotely and then call them out. If they encounter large-scale clusters, they will call for long-range artillery to clear them.

There are still dangers. For example, the team walks and walks into the face of undiscovered infected people and swarms, resulting in being chased; or some exist in buildings, wreckage, and tunnels, which are not easy to attack directly with artillery, so they have to go to find out the situation in person. If there are many enemies, they will directly blow up the buildings and tunnels and bury the enemies; if there are few enemies... then there is no way, go ahead and clear them one by one.

These will cause casualties.

In fact, these casualties can be avoided in theory, but a missile from the "Dongfeng Fen" costs 800,000 tax coins, and the life of a Star Army soldier is only worth 5 yuan. The commander above will settle the account.

What kind of bunker-buster bombs, what kind of high-powered weapons attacks, unless it is necessary after evaluation, the Army Department should pay with its lives. The cost of killing dozens or hundreds of big heads is much lower.

Not only Wanzhou Star is like this, but many galaxies and worlds ravaged by Iron Armor may become like this.

At present, it seems that Humphrey Paul himself is the largest node creature in the Iron Armor Legion. The other Iron Armor units fighting in distant worlds are acting under his authorization. When he died, the authorization chain was broken, and he could no longer get a connection with the Queen of the Worm. All the "authorizations" expired and all members were disconnected from the Internet.

Before a new line that can connect to the highest "Void Will" is reconstructed, they can't move.

Their destruction was stopped.

Even if humans need to spend many years in the future to fight these "disconnected" and non-aggressive swarms and infected groups, to put it bluntly, they are all some aftermath actions, and the cost will be very low.

In the sky, the starships controlled by the infected of the Iron Armor were also stopped. They were caught up by the joint fleet of the Alliance and the Western Front Legion and destroyed one by one.

These ships are not worth occupying. The internal structure has been changed too much. If it is not a worm or an infected person, it cannot be opened. It is not impossible to tow it back for repair and modification, but the time and cost are not as good as building a new one.

Mars took away several "infected warships" and forced people to go up to clean up the infected inside. After the cleaning is completed, they will arrange a tugboat to take away the spoils.

Their decision caused a lot of complaints. There will be many sacrifices when going on board to clean up the infected.

But obviously, those oil guys don't care. They only care about these precious research samples and how many new things they can make later.

In this regard, Salilius was powerless to stop it and could only turn a blind eye.

In fact, he arranged all these "aftermath work" to be done by his staff and subordinates.

He and Martins jointly wrote a battle report.

After polishing, one copy will be sent to Holy Terra as a good news to stabilize the mood of the Terra masters and to praise their merits.

The other copy will be sent to Gu Hang.

If nothing unexpected happens, they will leave some troops to deal with the aftermath, to deal with the remaining troubles in the Baimu Star Region, and even to the west of Baimu, in the many worlds that were ruined by Iron Armor.

Their core forces will launch a counterattack on the east side of the Baimu Star Region, defeat the swarm of insects that emerged from the Huangnu Star Region, and try to enter the Huangnu Star Region to join forces with Gu Hang.